Orpheus in the Underworld

Jan Brueghel spent the years from 1592 to 1596 in Italy, and he signed this copper plate in the lower left corner, Brueghel 1594. Flemish scenes of hell sold well to Italian collectors in those years, who wanted the monsters that Bosch and the painter's own father had made famous, on something small enough for a cabinet. This one is about 27 by 36 centimetres. Orpheus stands with his harp before the thrones of Pluto and Proserpina, asking for his wife Eurydice back, and the two rulers of the underworld are shown talking it over. The plate was long catalogued under his elder brother, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who was nicknamed Hell Brueghel, until a comparison with an infernal scene in the Ambrosiana in Milan moved it to Jan. It came into the Medici collections much later, recorded at the Uffizi in 1704 and moved to the Pitti in 1928. In this palace, in October 1600, Jacopo Peri sang the part of Orpheus in his own Euridice, the earliest opera whose music survives.